“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room” — Jeff Bezos.
What is Branding?
Branding is the process of establishing a unique company identity in the eyes of your target audience, thereby determining how people perceive your company. By highlighting the many aspects of the product or service, projecting the company’s mission statements, and paying attention to all the elements, such as the logo, company name, web design, etc., a brand is created, giving the company a unique perspective.
Branding is an inevitable part of building a successful business. Therefore, entrepreneurs must give due importance to their brand by focusing on creating a positive public perception of their company. The branding process depends heavily on what your brand says, the values it upholds, product communication, and how you want people to feel while dealing with your business.
Creating an identity and personality is crucial to building a brand that stands out.
Why is Branding important?
The key to a business’s success is to develop a brand that resonates with and is recognized by the target audience as an integral part of their daily lives. Branding helps you achieve these milestones.
The main purpose of branding is to increase brand awareness. Branding strategies are developed so that the brand, product and purpose get registered in the customer’s mind, always stay at the top of their mind, and become the household name they refer to. The higher the customer reach of a brand, the higher its success in increasing sales.
Branding has the capacity to make your brand memorable for the target audience, establish curiosity to ignite an interest in trying it out and create credibility about the product in the marketplace. These advantages help generate new business. In addition, branding helps maintain sales by keeping the brand relevant.
Branding helps create an identity and personality for the business that helps it to stand out among its competitors. For example, among the vast array of soaps, detergents, cosmetic products, etc., a few names will pop up in your mind that might have evolved to become synonymous with the product they sell.
In addition, branding strategies are the most effective ways to communicate the principles and values the business upholds. In addition to the product features, it also informs customers about the extra mile the companies go to create and execute policies that have a socially responsible aspect.
How to Brand?
The first step to branding is to create a face for your business. This means creating a logo that people can identify quickly, developing a personality and identity for your business, and upholding values that make you stand out in the market.
In most cases, the head of the company is the face of the business. For example, people remember Steve Jobs thinking of Apple or Elon Musk when mentioning Tesla. Even selecting brand ambassadors contributes to branding by giving your company a face.
Companies can more effectively plan their branding and marketing strategies by thoroughly understanding the target audience, including their demography, interests, and the platforms they use most frequently. For example, businesses that sell products to the younger generation must focus on social media platforms, while enterprises catering to the older population might focus on print media or television.
Understanding their likes and dislikes, interests and preferences, needs, and market gaps helps businesses develop their brand by addressing these demands and providing solutions.
Keeping a close eye on competitors’ progress in R&D, marketing, and promotion strategies will assist businesses in developing goals to improve and outperform them by introducing new and innovative trends to the market. Promoting such unique features allows businesses to distinguish themselves from their competitors, allowing them to stand out.
Creativity is key to developing a distinctive brand identity that makes companies stand out and attracts target customers. Therefore, their promotion strategies must have content that attracts the audience’s curiosity, prompting them to pause and learn more about the advertisement, the brand, the product, and what makes them unique.
Creating a brand, brand identity, and brand strategy requires a lot of thought and consideration because it will ultimately influence how the general public and the intended audience perceive a company.
It is an essential component of running a business because it plays a huge role in determining your company’s growth and progress in the future. Therefore, companies must be strategic and tactical when developing brand ideas so that the intended audience finds them appealing.
Small businesses must invest time and effort in determining what brand identity they choose to present to the public eye and work towards achieving it. To read more about these topics, subscribe to Indigenous SME Business Magazine. For the latest updates, visit our Twitter page at @IndigenousSme.
